2. Thèse de doctorat : Enlightening the Dark Zone: UNESCO, Science and the Reordering of the World in the Global South, 1937-1959

In 1946, UNESCO launched the creation of the International Institute for the Hylean Amazon (IIHA) in the heart of the Amazon forest. With this world-leading laboratory for tropical research, the scientists promoting the plan aspired no less than modernizing the underdeveloped tropical confines of the globe and building world peace. Despite its laudable intentions, the IIHA sparked heated controversies. Quickly, scientists from around the world clashed over the scientific and political purposes of the IIHA before the growing resistance of Latin Americans eventually put an end to the plan in 1952.

Enlightening the Dark Zone follows the making and unmaking of the IIHA and through it investigates the ideas, achievements and failures of scientists to turn science into a powerful engine of peace and modernity between 1937 and 1959. It traces the ways in which scientists claimed political authority, unravels what political and international roles they assigned to science and highlights how these different conceptualizations participated in the reordering of postwar society. It depicts the building of post-war technocracy as a polyphonic and disputed process that involved Western and Southern scientists alike and that challenged the existing political and international order of the mid-twentieth century.

Thomas Mougey, ‘Needham at the Crossroads: History, Politics and International Science in Wartime China (1942-1946)’, The British Journal for the History of Science (2017) 50, pp.83-109

Communications orales

2019 - Feasts of Progress : Questioning the Scientific Conference at the Parisian International Expositions of the First Half of the 20th Century, at ESHS First Young Scholar Conference, Observatoire de Paris, Paris, France (September 11)

2017 - Postwar Imaginaries of Modernity in the Amazon : International Science, Politics and Tropical Nature, at the workshop ‘“the Engine of Modernity”, Construing Science as the Driving Force of History in the Twentieth Century’, Heyman Center, Columbia University, New York, USA (May 3)

2016 - Imagining New Worlds: International Science, Politics and Nature in PostWWII Amazonia, at the workshop Destruction and Conservation in Debate: Brazil’s Environmental History in a Global Perspective, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris, France (October 14)

2015 - UNESCO in the Jungle. Building World Peace in Amazonia 1945-1951, at the Maastricht/Mainz exchange symposium on the history of natural and cultural heritage conservation, Maastricht University, The Netherlands (November 18)

2015 - Retracing the Transnational Origins of Early UNESCO Science, at the Fifth edition of the History of Science PhD-Conference, Rodulc Abbaye of Kerkrade, the Netherlands, (January 23)

2014 - A Challenge to Centre/Periphery approaches: Paulo Carneiro and the Non-Western Origins of Early UNESCO Science at the ninth meeting of Science and Technology in the European Periphery (STEP), Lisbon, Portugal (September 2)

2014 - Science for Peace: UNESCO and the Postwar Reconstruction of International Science in the Amazon at STS Colloquium Conquering the World. New Work in the International History of Science and Technology, Maastricht University, the Netherlands (June 25)

2013 - International Science for World Peace: Joseph Needham and the Political Origins of UNESCO’s International Science Program (1945-1954), at the fifth Gewina Meeting of Historians of Science in the Low Countries, Woudschoten, the Netherlands, (June 14)

Enseignements / Autres collaborations

Tutoring in BA European Studies, Maastricht University (2013-2019)Tutoring in BA Arts and Culture, Maastricht University (2012-2014)Tutoring in BA minor, International Studies, ‘Urban Development and Poverty in the 21th century’, (2015)BA thesis supervision in BA European Studies, Maastricht University (2019)Mentoring in BA European Studies, Maastricht Univerity (2018-2019)